Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.
One who imitates what is bad always goes beyond his model; while one who imitates what is good always comes up short of it.
Francesco Guicciardini
Affairs that depend on many rarely succeed.
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
Ursula K. LeGuin
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.
The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame;I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame;But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves,Where the rainbows play in the flying spray,'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.
Eugene O'Neill, Free
I learnt that men were moved by a savage egoism, that love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing
When we are old and these rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream,And out of all our burning there remainsNo feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream,This be our solace: that it was not saidWhen we were young and warm and in our prime,Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,Sleeping away the unreturning time.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, When We
Some beautiful things are more impressive when left imperfect than when too highly finished.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld, Ma
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Sc
There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Booker T. Washington
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colours are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content.
Lin Yutang
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
Diane Arbus
A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.
Napoleon Bonaparte
The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother.
I made all my generals out of mud.
The art of government is not to let me grow stale.
Public instruction should be the first object of government.
Large legislative bodies resolve themselves into coteries, and coteries into jealousies.
The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.
Great people are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.
Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.
True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.
Copyrighted © 2023 — Quotation.io. All rights reserved.
